Uranium Cuts a Tragic Path Through the Navajo Nation

http://www.telluridewatch.com/articles/2008/01/02/news/doc47769e602698d188576771.txt

Three coyotes run through the sagebrush, stopping briefly to check us out. Head of the Uranium Education Project at Diné College Perry Charley and I are out in the windswept canyons of the Navajo Reservation, looking at the legacy of uranium mining and its sad and tragic intertwining with Navajo lives and livelihood.

The coyote is the trickster in Navajo lore and culture, ready to show you that things are not always what they seem. It can be a specter of evil, malice and chaos, but also a beneficent figure. Uranium has been a dual presence in Navajo life, as well, first providing jobs in the late 1930s and early 40s, when the people were starving and the economic outlook bleak – and now today, having left in its wake a trail of death, disease and heartbreaking loss, as the Navajo Nation copes with the ravages of uranium mining.

Late this year, spurred to action by a series of articles in The Los Angeles Times in 2006, Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) held a hearing on “The Health and Environmental Impacts of Uranium Contamination in the Navajo Nation” in the House Oversight Committee.

The Navajo Nation’s Edith Hood testified at that hearing about “a Navajo concept called hozho.

<more>

I really wonder how much Cancer in America today that could be traced back to the above ground testing they done way back when.

nuclear testing back in the early 50s in SW Utah, and died of lung cancer at age 47, though he had also smoked ages 16-32.

It can't have helped to get exposed to radiation......

piled in large piles when I lived near Ambrosia Lake New Mexico. It was fenced off by chain link fences. The wind however blew it right through the fences . My dad worked there as an electrician for about 4 months and then we moved on but he died 7 years later with cancer of the stomach.